


crazy is this hazy pull (that draws me close)

by midwestwind



Category: Psych
Genre: 5+1 Things, Canon Compliant, F/M, Internal Conflict, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 17:55:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7232779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midwestwind/pseuds/midwestwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Shawn Spencer wants to kiss Juliet O'Hara.</p>
<p>And one time she kisses him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	crazy is this hazy pull (that draws me close)

He kind of wants to kiss her the moment he meets her. Which isn’t unusual, really. Shawn wants to kiss most attractive people as soon as he meets them. Hell, he’d spent an entire month in Europe kissing any man or woman who wanted to kiss him a few years back.

 

So, when he spots the attractive blonde who’s taken over his seat, who offers an easy smile when he walks over, it’s not unexpected that he wants to kiss her.

 

“Can I get a name to work with?” He asks, once he’s officially decided he’s going to try to kiss her. If she wants to kiss him back, anyway.

 

“Juliet,” she offers, the small bite to her voice betrayed by the way the corners of her mouth tick upwards. It’s an encouragement, that and the unmistakable bit of interest in her eye. Shawn can work with these things, at least.

 

He really lays it on thick, with the whole voice and pulling from things he’s noticed about her. He hasn’t met many women who walk around with photos of their parents in their wallets. It’s cute, he thinks. Juliet startles at the amount of knowledge, slamming the newspaper down on the countertop and turning to him.

 

“Okay, _do_ we know each other?”

 

“ _Yes_!” He responds. “You are the girl who stole my seat!”

 

And then Scary Guy walks in and Juliet ducks her head and suddenly everything makes sense. She stole his seat for a view of the front door, she’s flipping through the paper to seem busy. Of course, she’s a cop. Is there anyone in this town who _isn’t_ a cop? It’s getting a bit ridiculous, if you ask him.

 

Shawn isn’t sure he wants to kiss her anymore.

 

Juliet pulls her gun and it shakes in her hands, the black metal silhouetted against the sunlight coming through the windows and emphasizing the unsteadiness of the maneuver. Lassiter comes through the door, pinning the guy down with about a half dozen other undercover cops in civvies and Juliet stows her gun, clearly backup rather than an accepted member of this operation.

 

Shawn watches as she returns to her seat, hands still a little shaky and back ramrod straight. The tension rolls off her in waves, the eyes of the other patrons within the diner still settled on her as the last remaining police officer in the establishment.

 

“First time pulling your gun?” He asks, because he can’t resist. Because _she’s a cop_. Gus says Shawn’s luck is unbelievable, has been since they were kids. He can’t decide if the woman sitting next to him amassed from a bought of good luck or bad luck.

 

“Maybe,” she bites and he’s smirking just because he can. The orange juice is acidic and bitter on his tongue as she brushes past him out of the diner. He tracks her movements, losing her for a moment as she crosses behind him. At the door, she throws a glance back at him.

 

He wonders if her lips taste like peaches the same way she had smelled. He definitely still wants to kiss her.

 

-/-

 

In hindsight, he never really stops wanting to kiss Juliet O’Hara. It’s just that it can be ignored, placed on the back burner for a better time or once he’s sure she wants to kiss him, too. Sometimes, though, it hits him in a sudden wave of affection. He’s always attracted to her, always in awe of her. It’s the way he could see himself loving her that stalls him.

 

Which is stupid, because he’s known her for all of about a year and a half and it’s also the longest he’s stayed in one place since he was eighteen. There are too many reasons for him _not_ to put his heart in her hands, even those outside of his own emotional issues. Emotional issues that he is, to use language from his therapist mother, repressing the hell out of.

 

But Juliet flashes him a secretive wink and mouths a grateful _thank you_ all because he let his childhood hero point a gun at him, and Shawn is overcome by another one of those waves of affection. A moment of perfectly clarity about the way he feels about Juliet O’Hara, a feeling that starts with wanting to press gentle kisses to her lips and doesn’t seem to end.

 

The feeling leaves him in a state of weariness, too much for this one moment on top of all the things he has to do to close this case. It doesn’t stop him from leaving Gus at the car and heading back inside to see her, once more, just to make sure she’s okay.

 

The way she’d looked at him in that diner earlier today, looked through him really, had unsettled him more than he could let on. He could do more good by finding the guy that had slipped through her fingers than by fretting over her emotional state. Shawn’s pretty sure Juliet wouldn’t have taken well to his fretting anyway. Still, he has to be sure. He has to know that this one thing, this minor infraction on her otherwise flawless _Good Cop_ standing, isn’t going to sit on her shoulders. Shawn just wants to make sure she knows-

 

“It was a mistake,” he reminds her, after she’s thanked him again while making a dig at herself. He takes a step forward and places his hand consolingly on her shoulder. It trips him up, though, more than he should be letting it, and he swears he had more to say. He’s sure there are more words to make her believe that no one is doubting her, no one is blaming her. Instead, what comes out is, “that’s what friends are for.”

 

The words come out haltingly, without the usual smoothness he so prides himself on. Juliet’s following words don’t have the same problem, but her eyes betray her reaction to the touch as well. It’s not like they don’t touch, fist bumps and small brushes, but this. This, in the dimmed lights of the empty precinct, in this quiet moment where no one can intrude on them, this feels different.

 

He quips about the parrot she doesn’t own - _cats_ , he thinks, _she has cats_ \- and Juliet parries in the same way she always does. _Shawn, I don’t have a parrot_. The wave of affection is a riptide now, a tug at his legs as he wades further into these treacherous waters, and it threatens to tug him under. Juliet’s soft smile at his teasing sings to him, calls him forward like a mythological Siren.

 

“Well, in that case,” he responds, his voice lower than he intends, but the pull is too strong to be helped now and he’s moving towards her. He uses the hand on her shoulder as leverage as he steps forward, halting only once his nose is brushing against hers, the tip of it pressed into the warm skin of her cheek.

 

“Shawn, what are you doing?” She asks, the false calm of her words undermined by the shaky way her breath fans across his lips, sets him ablaze.

 

“Nothing,” he responds immediately, faring no better than her and he’s certain Juliet can tell. They both depend on their ability to read people for their livelihood, after all. He feels frozen, stuck in this moment of beautiful torture. He won’t go any further unless she does, willing to wait until she presses up on her toes and ends both their suffering.

 

Shawn’s never thought much about drowning, but if it feels anything like this, he thinks he understands why people write poetry about it and fill their pockets with rocks.

 

_Mistake_. The word falls from her mouth to his with their mingled breaths. It reverberates his mind, shaking him in a new way, because he knows she’s right. He knows this can’t be their moment, not when she feels indebted to him and he is scared. He is always so god damned scared.

 

“I call it very close talking,” he deflects instead, because this is what he’s good at. The patented Shawn Spencer Shuffle - you take a half step forward, five back, and then run as fast as you can.

 

“Ah, I see,” she responds - he thinks maybe she does, really - and her lower lip presses to his with the movement of the words. He can still feel it, the warm pressure of it, once it’s gone and maybe this can be enough. Maybe this can be his fix. “Do you have anything else to say?”

 

He hums, lips puckering up and pressing against the skin above her top lip. Not quite a kiss, not quite her lips. Not quite enough, but he’s willing to take what she’ll allow him in this moment alone. When he shakes his head, hers moves with it, and he thinks she’s grinning. He wants to taste it. Instead, he relaxes his lips, closes his eyes, and says, “no. I think I’m good for now.”

 

And he may be. It may be enough to get through this momentary lapse in the mental walls he puts between himself and Juliet O’Hara. The next wave will come when he least expects it, he’s sure. She’ll smirk and deflect one of his come ons, or snap her fingers and decode one of his vague _visions_ , or maybe she’ll just smile at him and suddenly set his whole being ablaze with bliss over her continued existence.

 

In the meantime, he can pull himself away from her and leave to her somewhat stilted goodnight. Grin at the continued feeling of his lips pressed to her skin - not the right part, but _a_ part and that should be enough. It won’t be until later that the folly of the exercise really hits him, all of his reasons flying out the window as he realizes there’s no point in trying to keep his heart to himself. Juliet’s already had that part of him for a while.

 

-/-

 

He’s possibly the worst person alive. Well, actually, he catches murderers for a living and he just bestowed upon his best friend one of the best speeches he’s ever given. Which, for him, is saying something. People talk about his ego but, frankly, Shawn thinks he could be a lot worse.

 

And, yeah, okay maybe that’s the whole ego talking, but his point stands.

 

Either way, even he can’t deny that looking over the head of the girl - you’re facsimile dream girl who has done nothing short of exceed your expectations all night - as you contemplate the way she’d just kissed you to look at another girl? Yeah, that’s pretty much Class A douchey. The type of thing that, upon seeing another guy do to his date, he would promptly find a subtle way of making the person aware.

 

It’s just that, Abigail is amazing and twice as good of a person as he had always imagined she’d be, but Shawn is starting to realize something. With stunning clarity, he is beginning to understand that there’s only one person he wants, quite desperately and pathetically, to kiss.

 

And that person is standing at the other end of the decorated gym in her stupidly poofy dress pretending not to feel out of place. He had placed a crown on her head not fifteen minutes earlier, unashamed of his bias, even in the face of nearly his entire graduating class.

 

He had wanted to kiss her.

 

But Abigail was here, a real present person with the possibility of… _something_. Shawn didn’t want to let her just leave, not again when he had spent so much time thinking about her even in the past thirteen years. He didn’t know what he expected, knew that at the very least she deserved an explanation and the knowledge that what went wrong between them wasn’t her. It was him. He’s always the one to make the wrong turn, run when his feelings threaten to overwhelm him.

 

She’d kissed him and he’d felt seventeen all over again, finally kissing the girl of his dreams. And it _was_ nice. Definitely in the top ten kisses of his lifetime and, as we’ve established, Shawn Spencer has done _a lot_ of kissing. _Practically perfect_ , she had said.

 

_Practically_ , though, that’s what’s tripping him up.

 

Closure feels good. It feels like a nice, healthy word in his mouth. He doesn’t know if he’s ever had it before, ever allowed himself the luxury of it in all his tripping over himself to get away from things that frightened him. And he calls Gus the coward.

 

Once Abigail has gone, a gentle hand on his shoulder as she passed by, and he’s decided that if he stares at Juliet O’Hara any longer it will officially be creepy, he decides to end Juliet’s suffering.

 

“You can leave, you know?” He comments, coming up next to her and pulling her from a conversation with an old classmate he doesn’t bother trying to remember. “The case is wrapped up, Lassie’s left. You don’t have to stick around here.”

 

“Yeah, I just,” Juliet says, shrugging as she grips her purse strap tightly in one hand. “I didn’t want to just leave without saying goodbye. How did things go with that girl, Abigail, right?”

 

Shawn considers his responses. He could ask how she got the information, though the likeliest answer is his blabber mouth best friend. He could tease her, ask if she’s jealous of his high school fling, but remembers that he’s the one who asked her here, that he’s the one who can’t stop wondering what she tastes like. Probably for the best to avoid that. Instead, he opts for the truth.

 

“Ah, good,” he admits, waving a bit dismissively because he’s being honest, but he’s not about to bare his soul. “I think we’re both gonna be able to move on now.”

 

“Really?” Juliet asks. There’s a hitch to her breath that Shawn doesn’t miss, makes something in his chest flutter. An upbeat song starts to play, a familiar beat he’s heard far too many times in this single evening. The Electric Slide. He smirks at Juliet anyway, raising his index finger into the air.

 

“You hear that?” He asks, eyebrows raising. He doesn’t bother waiting for a response. “I think this might be your jam.”

 

Juliet rolls her eyes, a smile tugging at her lips, and shakes her head at him. She lets him slide his hand into hers, though, and lead her into the center of the large room where the gathered crowd shuffles in a poorly coordinated dance.

 

-/-

 

The thing is she could die. Juliet could die today and he’d never know. He’d never know what her lips feel like pressed to his, how her voice sounds in the morning when it’s coated with sleep, what it would be like for her to share in his feelings if only for a few fleeting hours.

 

And he’s sure she shares them. If he tries, he can still feel the imprint of her lips against his cheek, her thumb wiping the leftover gloss from his skin as she pretended not to be hurt by his rejection. Hardly a rejection, really. On any other night, in any other circumstance, he would have jumped at the chance to close the distance between them.

 

He’d been trying to do the right thing, though. The healthy thing. Now, though, he wonders how long he can delay the inevitable. How long he can let it eat him up inside, affections more of an ache than a bliss nowadays, before it’s too much. Before something, most likely him, breaks.

 

If she dies today, he supposes that will be his answer.

 

It won’t soften the blow, Shawn knows enough to know that. Telling her can’t make losing her any easier, if that’s what it comes to. The thought is enough to make his chest seize, his lungs tightening uncomfortably beneath his ribs. If she goes, he doesn’t know how he’ll stand it. He’s never been good at all this, the serious stuff, the real stuff.

 

He’s willing to try, though, if it can change something. He suddenly, so desperately, wishes to be something Juliet deserves. And, if it’s Shawn you’re asking, Juliet deserves the world.

 

Gus comes in, he’s been talking for a while and saying almost nothing, and suddenly Juliet isn’t dying today. Not here, in this awful hospital, her heartbeat displayed in green on the monitor. There’s going to be time, moments to come for him to answer his questions. Days, months, years for him to find the words, find the way to say things he’s always been too afraid of.

 

He still wants to say it, though, here in this place where he realized that any life without Juliet in it is suddenly so terribly, excruciatingly bleak. Shawn wants to find the words, wants to try.

 

“I don’t want to miss out on the prize,” he says in a sudden rush, because he believes it and it’s the only thing he’s said in his babbling that means something. She is a prize, not in the sense that he can win her or earn her. She’s precious jewels and works of art lost to the world and gold straight from Midas’ touch, more than any man should ever think himself fit to hold.

 

He doesn’t deserve the luck he’s had that’s led him into her presence. He doesn’t deserve her.

 

It’s the fear that trips him up, sends him running from the room the moment Lassiter gives him the out. He shuts down Gus, interested in neither his sympathy nor his smugness. Juliet finds his eyes through the window, stunned and confused and hurt. His chest tightens anew, awash with a whole new pain. Nothing has changed, really. Juliet isn’t going to die today and Shawn is still a coward.

 

-/-

 

He hadn’t been there, something Shawn may never forgive himself for. He’d saved two lives, though, rather than the one Yin had allowed him. Abigail would be getting on a plane and going somewhere she could make a difference, not rotting where she’d been tied to the dock. Juliet would be going home to her house and her cats with a heart still beating in her chest rather than smeared across the concrete.

 

Mary’s dead and Shawn might not forgive himself for that, either. Yin had delivered the blow, but maybe if they’d trusted Mary more, maybe if Shawn had figured it out sooner. He’s supposed to be the smart one, the one who figures it out, who gives the big wrap up and saves the day. There aren’t supposed to be dead waitresses and sort-of-friends on his hands.

 

In all this, the horrors marring his mind, it’s the image of Juliet on that clocktower that haunts his dreams.

 

He hadn’t seen it, hadn’t _been there_. (Gus had and Shawn thought that would be enough, truly believed it would make it up somehow.) The not seeing is almost worse, maybe. He’s got an active imagination, as people love to remind him, and it’s come up with a hundred different ways she could have tumbled to her death. Most nights, he can’t save her in time. Others, the rope breaks anyway and Juliet, gagged and bound, falls silently. Some nights there’s no chair, no timer, Yin just pushed her with a sick smirk on his blurred face.

 

He wakes up from these, shivering and bleary and desperate for her. The touch of her hand, the sound of her voice, a small thing to assure him of her continued existence. There’s nothing, of course, and he fiddles with his phone sometimes as he entertains the idea of calling her. Too chicken to call, too shaken to risk closing his eyes again.

 

She’s not coming to work, understandably. It’s only been a few weeks and her temporary reassignment to City Hall is meant to be calming. It might be, he figures, if he’d leave her the fuck alone. He would, but sleep is becoming more and more difficult and he just needs to see her some days. He’ll bring lunch or a smoothie and she’ll roll her eyes - caught between fond and annoyed - as she assures him she’s _fine_.

 

He’s not. That’s the problem.

 

Shawn’s mind is truly twisted and he needs to stop eating before bed. It conjures up a particularly gruesome sight tonight. Juliet begging him to save her, Yin laughing at his misfortune, poorly thought out rhymes threatening his mental state. It doesn’t matter, in the end she falls and he can’t save her.

 

It’s no different, the ending, than any other night. But his hands are shaking when he flips on the light next to his bed and he’s not pulling air into his lungs slow enough to breathe. Her number is dialed, phone ringing against his ear before he can think better of it.

 

“You’ve reached Juliet O’Hara,” her voice is chipper over the voicemail. It’s not a great solution, but it’s better than waking her at two in the morning just to hear her voice. Shawn takes long pulls of air as he listens to the message. “I’m not available right now. If it’s an emergency, please call the Santa Barbara police department…”

 

He listens, heart rate slowing, until the beep for her voicemail before hanging up. His hands are no longer rattling the phone around as he replaces it on the nightstand. The missed call will show up on her phone, he knows, and she may ask about it. He thinks Juliet probably knows him well enough that she won’t, though.

 

Still, he wishes he could see her. Showing up at City Hall to act like everything is fine just isn’t the proper medium. Shawn isn’t interested in baring all of his mental hang ups to her, wouldn’t want to add his problem on top of her own even if he could, but still. City Hall and it’s busy file room doesn’t foster personal conversation or light teasing.

 

It’s probably for the best it’s the only time he sees her now. He fears that he wouldn’t be able to restrain himself without the necessity of doing so. If he were to see her in her home or a diner, there may be no social convention keeping him from doing what he’s wanted to do - hasn’t stopped wanting to do - since he met her.

 

This time, when he drifts back to sleep, he dreams of peaches and the press of Juliet O’Hara’s lips.

 

-/-

 

When he does finally, _finally_ kiss her, it’s of her own making. Which, if Shawn is honest, is definitely the only way he’d have wanted it to happen. The moment she does it, he hopes to all those deities he stopped believing in as a kid that Juliet will never stop initiating kisses.

 

He barely knows what he’s saying, is trying to give his permission without giving his permission. It’s not that he’s _okay_ with her and Declan now. He’s not, he’s trying to be, but he’s really, really not. Still, he wants her to understand that, despite his own feelings, he wants her to do what’s going to make her happy. If a romantic trip with the boyfriend that is very much not him is going to do it, then, so be it.

 

His fingers drift to his temple and his other hand presses over his heart as he suggests how she keep her memories, and he’s memorizing the way Juliet is looking at him right now. It’s too much, though, and as it’s been establish; Shawn is a coward. So, he chuckles and recants.

 

And then Juliet is kissing him and he can’t remember his own name let alone whatever he’d been trying to say.

 

It’s nothing like he’d imagine and everything he’d wanted and it _hurts_. Her lips slide against his, the strawberry taste of her lipgloss a surprise, and he’s amazed he’s keeping himself standing. Her hand rests on his neck, fingers spanning over his jaw and scraping across the stubble there. The other is leveraged on his shoulder and this feels familiar. And it hurts because even in his Juliet O’Hara addled mind, Shawn knows it is fleeting.

 

Still, she kisses him for longer than he was beginning to believe they’d ever be allowed. She kisses him in slow, gentle movements that warm him from within as her fingers press into his skin. Shawn wants to give as good as he gets, wants to impress the meaning of this for him upon her. He wants to kiss her with all the awe and reverence she deserves.

 

There’s no _time_ , though. Juliet pulls away just enough to press her lips to his once more, hand hand gliding from his neck down over her collarbone. It’s not the kiss he’d always wanted, it’s sad and soft, like a last chance. And then, like a light coming on, she’s tugging away and Shawn is too dazed for a second to look at her. When he does, what he finds is enough to break him. She backs away, regret or fear or something his mind can’t place right now furrowing her brow.

 

There’s a scuffle on the stairs and the sound of Declan’s voice down the long hallway. He’s seen Juliet undercover and he’s seen her lay on the sympathy in interrogation, she is a world class pretender. Nearly as good as him, he’d wager. It’s all he can do to hold it together long enough - as Declan holds her and kisses her cheek and Juliet smiles like Shawn can’t still feel her lips on his own - to comment something vaguely in character, “If Gus and I ever make it out that way we’ll look forward to stealing some towels.”

 

Because, honestly, who just _buys_ a whole hotel when they can’t book a room?

 

He stumbles towards the door, pulling it open for Gus to leave first, and can’t keep himself from looking back. If this were biblical, he’d be a pile of sand in Declan’s front door. Juliet meets his eye before he tugs the door shut and it’s long enough, long enough to realize the mistake he’s been making all these years.

 

When it comes to Juliet, he could never be satisfied with just one kiss.


End file.
